Entrepreneur King; his Pink City & the Future

Maharaja Jaisingh - 1688 - 1743 - (photo taken from the murals of the Jaipur museum).

Maharaja Jaisingh was an exceptional king. Amongst many of his great achievements in the 18th century was building of the city of Jaipur, which is still intact, vibrant and fully operational. But he built this city with a purpose. He wanted it to be a great trading center rather than a fort like city which was the prevalent style during those days.

And he hit upon a very novel idea. He thought to turn his subjects into micro entrepreneurs and traders so as to transform his desert kingdom into a wealthy and flourishing one. With this in mind he built small shops within the city with wide roads for transportation of goods. He also wanted to make it aesthetically pleasing. Therefore all buildings were made out of pink colored stones from which the city got its name the 'Pink City', where none of the buildings could be built beyond a certain height.

It was a rather exceptional idea to rent out these newly constructed shops in the heart of the city to commoners rather than to noblemen of his courts. He charged them a very small rent in exchange of letting them run their family business from these spaces for commerce. Even after 200 years of their existence the value of the rent has gone up to measly sum of Rs 30/- a month (under $1). The idea was not profiting from the rentals but letting people learn and do business and add wealth and cultural value to the princely state of Jaipur. A casual round of the place shows us the great variety of trades and professions the people were engaged in, most of which continues till this day. Businesses are passed down from one generation to the next. Artisans (read freelancers) flocked to this place from all over India not only to enrich the culture of the place but also put a permanent signature of their unique quality at affordable prices.

This had far fetching repercussions and implications on the development of the nature and structure of Indian businesses, some of which are the following:

1. Created a class of astute and die-hard business families called 'Marawaris'. They hate to do anything other than business.

2. Augmented the concept of 'family business', which is the prevalent style of doing business in India.

3. Promise and trust were the cornerstones of doing business where verbal agreements were equally honored like written agreements.

4. Promoted local crafts that pulled together designers, artisans, businessmen, freelancers, entrepreneurs, job seekers all over India especially from Bengal and Gujarat. The impressions of their fine art work of Bengal and Gujarat seem to be all over the place in Northern India, which even found a prominent place in Muslim and Mugal artifacts. Over time people from Gujarat were also sucked into becoming small and big businessmen but Bengalis stuck to their nomadic freelancer and micro entrepreneur life style. In that way they not only became the second largest community scattered all over India but also the eleventh richest community in the world.

5. Preservation of traditional crafts and professions till date, which the British wanted to obliterate with standardization of their products supported by efficient transportation connecting thousands of villages across India. It is in the desert region of Rajasthan that they miserably failed to push their concept of standardized and cheap products carried through an efficient railways system. This happened because British goods did not suit the local needs or matched the culture of the place. Their products weren't life centric as the traditional products were.

6. This brings up the unique topic of designing 'life centric products'. For instance, in these markets, one would find a blanket that weighs about 100 grams, which can be folded into a very small size. The unique life centric feature of such a blanket is that it is cool on one side and warm on the other. Such an artifact is completely life centric to the nomadic tribes of the region. It is light and small to carry and can be used both in the daytime when temperatures soar and in the night when the mercury dips too low. The brass vessels used for storing water serves as another live example of a life centric product. People in the desert have used brass vessels for storing brackish water to turn them into potable drinking water for centuries. So the traders still sell brass vessels so useful in a place used to having scanty or no rainfall during the whole year. Even today, these traders are busy selling such life centric wares, which as I saw kept evolving over time with changing contexts.

7. The business models that operate are built on three vital principles -- a) Robustness b) Resilience c) Natural cycles and rhythms linked to patterns of living. They have cleverly blended the concepts of robustness/reliability with resilience into their products and business models. The products are cheap, aesthetically pleasing and reliable over long periods of time. As opposed to concepts of robustness and reliability these businesses, which have stood the test of time, primarily evolved around the concepts of resilience and patterns of living tied to Nature. The businesses were resilient to stand the test of time since they had the innate ability to detect changes in the likes, dislikes and changing demands of the people and times (a sort of collaborative effort) to quickly adjust and adapt to those changes. It means rather than think in terms of fixed and often larger volumes, scaling up, improved infrastructure etc the businesses were in tune with the patterns of living of the masses that varied with the rhythms and cycles of nature. People needed different artifacts at different times of the year hence the supply was not tuned to a pump out a steady constant volume pushed month after month over the year based on average 'customer needs' to minimize operating costs to maximize profits but churned out in variable volumes in collaboration with the customers' patterns of living to meet variable demands at different times of the year. Hence these family businesses never felt a need to grow beyond the space their small shops provided them for the past 200 years. They persevered in adapting, maintaining and creating wealth within the constraints of their given space. I was indeed fascinated by the remarkable business model that not only obviates the need for constant capital infusion to keep one's neck above water but also creates unimaginable wealth for the families and others. (See a live success story of such operating model being used as a strategy in competitive environment here)

(A glimpse of the old shops running their family businesses in the Pink City, October 2011)

My visit to the Pink City was more than enlightening. I was rewarded by sudden but deep insights in to the business psyche of the Indians and a possibe model that would serve us in the future.

The new questions that arise in my mind now are:

1. What are we doing to preserve these principles in the present context?

2. Can start ups and new entrepreneurs take a leaf out of these old lessons to model their business?

3. How can we create a platform or network of such budding entrepreneurs and make them thrive and grow over the years just like Maharaj Jaisingh did in his Pink City?

4. What we need to do to move from the business models based on robustness and reliability to a business model that primarily focuses on resilience without sacrificing resilience.

5. How can we bring down the operating, inventory and product costs through design rather than through scale ups, speed of operation and the constant need for capital infusion to increase infrastructure to accommodate growing volumes?

6. All our notions about business models and operating our businesses would change once we adopt the resilience model over robustness model. That would throw up hundreds of new questions to be answered.

I have just grown to love entrepreneurs -- design thinkers of sorts, who operate in seemingly impossible situations, solving problems with their heart & guts.

I feel this resilient way of doing business through micro entrepreneurs, where individual capital investment need not be high, holds the key to shape and inspire the future economy of the world, which presently is collapsing to its death crying out for a major transformation.

Do you think the same?

 

Rapidinnovation - See & Touch Invisible - DesignKata #2

The previous post dealt with the first Design Kata of keeping a journal in which a problem solver, innovator or design thinker keeps a record of the decisions taken and how one arrived at those decisions.

However, as we know the most important task for a problem solver or design thinker is to find a ‘why’ for an event, phenomenon or failure that takes place.

Keeping that in view Design Kata #2 deals with the practice of seeing and touching the invisible.

Why is that?

This is because answers to the ‘why’ of an event, phenomenon or failure lies in the understanding of the nature and quality of the interactions and interdependence of the elements that happen in a given space.

It is also clear that a) interdependence between things, b) the edges of interactions of such interdependent things and c) the transitions of states and relationships that take place of over time are physically invisible to the human eye.

Hence effective problem solving and design thinking is all about seeing and touching the invisible, without which cognition of a problem can’t even start. Admittedly, this is a difficult thing to practice.

And why is that?

It might be best understood by the visual representation, presented below

Diagram 1

Most of the traditional problem solving methods, techniques and processes start with viewing the top events or failures that emerge and then somehow try to drill below this level to understand the patterns that cause them, which are then attacked to solve the problem. Some methods also try to drill down one step further to understand the systemic relationships at work and try to change the relationships in an effort to solve problems.

Rapidinnovation, so to say, is an inversion of the traditional processes of finding the ‘why’ to problems.

After understand

ing the 'form' of the emergence (events and failures) it straight away views the elements and the ‘empty’ spaces in between the elements that contain the ‘undesirable’ dynamics causing ‘system imperfections’. Such ‘system imperfections’ constantly give rise to a gamut of patterns causing various possible emergences to happen over a period of time.

So the journey starts at the bottom of the diagram by viewing the elements (form), assessing their interdependence (feelings), perceiving the interactions or dynamics (perception) that helps us to form context specific concepts of the existing and other inherent ‘imperfections’ in the system that create enabling ‘patterns’ for myriad events and transition states to emerge (context specific mental constructs). Such ‘mental constructs’ then help us ‘understand’ the observed emergences and transition states. This then enables us to act and design suitable ‘balancing relationships’ that help us to eliminate a range of undesirable emergences of events and transition states. In a future post we would discuss the monitoring of transition states, which in itself would be another DesignKata.

Clearly then, seeing and touching the ‘invisible’ is an inverted way of viewing emergent phenomenon, events, failures and transition states. We don’t try to find the ‘why’ by directly drilling down. We do so by ‘inverting’ our view point, which I call as having, the ‘right view’ of things.

So, to practice this DesignKata of seeing and touching the ‘invisible’ the practitioner is advised to apply the inverted right view of things to whatever one encounters in daily life that might be a matter of interest to the practitioner.

However, it depends on the ‘signals’ one is capable of perceiving. And surely there are many interesting emergences one comes across in daily life. It is the intention of the observer that would keep him/her alive in this practice.   

 That for me is the practice of 'enlightenment' in the 'here and now' 

 

Rapidinnovation

In my previous post I promised to introduce Rapidinnovation -- a school of practice on innovation, which exists but not made know to the world so far. I feel the time has come to reveal this school of practice.

For the last 31 years I have been solving problems in engineering and manufacturing industries. Though it wasn't exactly the profession I started out with but over time the love for solving problems snowballed into an insatiable passion. Soon the passion overflowed and spread to almost all areas of various types of manufacturing industries working on a variety of difficult, wicked and seemingly unsolvable problems.

Unique solutions were found that gave stakeholders benefits year on year. But there was something that was odd. The way the problems were solved did not match any of the existing methods and so called processes of problem solving and innovation. It did not follow BPR (Business Process Reengineering) techniques. Neither did it use Six Sigma or TQM (Total Quality Management) tools. Nor did it apply tools of TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) or TOC (Theory of Constraints). Neither did it completely resemble Systems Thinking or Design Thinking nor did it completely follow the traditional lines of CBM (Condition Based Maintenance) and RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance) for addressing or solving machinery failures and problems. 

Soon, I understood that there was something unique in my Rapidinnovation practice, something "unnamed". It is definitely working in some way to which I could not put my finger upon for a long time. But the point was it was giving nothing less than outstanding results all the time. My teacher and mentor Prof Henry then named it Rapidinnovation, where the acronym stood for Reliability Availability and Performance Improvement through Design Innovation (Rapidinnovation).

That more or less defined the purpose and the approach in broad brush strokes. The purpose of innovation was clear. Any product of innovation, whether soft or hard must be reliable for the intended purpose (must not fail while working), must be available to perform for the desired time and also provide the desired Performance (for example, protect ecology, ensure safety, ensure value, alleviate sufferings, improve productivity etc..). And the approach to achieve the objectives would be through Design Innovation or Design Thinking. 

The area of application was also clear, which is as follows:

Innovations must be based on the 'NOW' (N). Innovation must be based on 'Present Failures' (F). Innovation must solve some 'Present Problems' (P). And NFP innovations must be guided and informed by reality. Otherwise it is mere distorted thinking or imagination to cover some unreal risks.

Looking more closely, I soon realized that it is different to all other schools of thinking on innovation. The difference was that while other schools insisted on specific tool set, techniques, processes Rapidinnovation was based on a few principles. The other important difference was stress on human understanding. While other schools of thought grossly ignore this aspect of development of human understanding which is the corner stone of Rapidinnovation approach.

To summarize, the important issues of Rapidinnovation are:

1. It is based on the basic premise of 'interconnected' and 'interdependent' whole.

2. It is based on a few principles of "becoming", "flow", "balance" and "change of states".

3. It is based on the development of human understanding rooted in 'non-fear' rather than heavy use of tools and techniques

However, it does not do away with domain knowledge expertise though at the same time it urges one to do away with firmly held notions, ideas and pet theories, which when often repeated exhibit hidden fears rather than confidence to make sense of reality, so essential to problem solving and innovation. In brief, it strongly discourages Fear Induced Innovation (FII).

There is another thing. Innovation is not only about 'exploration' that seeks new perspectives and ways. After an innovation is designed, implementing and putting it to proper use is 'exploitation'. Exploitation is doing routine things efficiently whereas 'exploration' forces us to think differently. So the two parts of innovation are 'Exploration' and 'Exploitation'. For balance, both are equally needed. One can't be separated from the other.

Since we need both Exploration and Exploitation we need both the skills of the left and the right brains. We need to think in both parts and the whole. We need explore as well as exploit. We need to be effective as well as efficient. 

Clearly we have now come to the ''inclusive'' age not the age of excluding this or that or trading this for that or insisting on 'one true way' or exhibiting 'holier than thou attitudes'. It is therefore time to get free of jargons and sound bites (efforts to create sort of myriad 'self identities') of all sorts and focus on what needs to be done to get inclusive results that help many. This is because Ideas and concepts of 'exclusion' do not resonate deep within and stir the human soul to do what it was always meant to do -- create and adapt.

And following the trends towards increasing openness and collaborative efforts Rapidinnovation conveys 'Openness' that allow people to create their own approaches, tools and techniques within the given principles of understanding the dynamics of Nature and Life. Weighing it down by any dogmas, insisting on specific tools and techniques would be not only unfortunate and counterproductive but also disastrous. It must remain open to reality and must remain contextually relevant to the time of application helping people solve their problems both personal and professional by their own 'free will' within the given contextual constraints of apparent 'determinism' aiming at balancing the dynamic paradox of the opposites. 

 

Innovator's Field Day -- Learning from Nature

Nature furnishes a wealth of examples of the nature of 'relationships' that leads to chaos, complexities, emergence, uncertainty and transformations -- embraced by the Rapidinnovation model. 

In this post we would discuss one of the fundamental laws that relates two fundamental terms quantitiy and quality. We observe in Nature that quantity changes the quality of an emergence. Even a small quantity can produce a dramatic effect on the output quality or create a dramatic emergent pattern. This would give innovators a clue as to what we might we use to create new relations, new systems, new products or simply solve nagging social and business problems. 

For instance, let us examine the relation between the different kinds of electromagnetic waves and their frequencies, that is, the speed with which they pulsate or vibrate at a given energy level.

Maxwell’s work showed that electromagnetic waves and light waves were of the same kind. However, at a later date, Quantum mechanics proved that the situation is much more complex and contradictory, but at lower frequencies, the wave theory holds good.

It is interesting to note that the properties of different waves is determined by the 'number of oscillations per second' or Hertz (the technical term used in the study of vibration).

The difference squarely lies is in the frequency of the waves, the speed with which they pulsate or the frequency of vibration. Hence it is quite clear that the property (or quality) of the waves changes (an emergent property) when the frequency (or quantity) changes. This change of property implies a change of behavior too. That is to say, quantitative changes give rise to different kinds of signals that differ in quality.

Translated into colours, red light indicates light waves of low frequency. An increased frequency of vibration turns the colour to orange-yellow, then to violet, then to the invisible ultra-violet and X-rays and finally to gamma rays. If we reverse the process, at the lower end, we go from infrared and heat rays to radio-waves. Thus, the same phenomenon manifests itself differently, completely depending on the frequency of vibration (higher to lower frequency). And this is determined by the quanity of energy we add or substract.

Interesting to note that as we move up the frequency ladder the emergent behavior changes from 'fields' to 'waves' and then to 'particles'. This is an important insight, the significance of which we would understand in a moment.

Thus Quantity changes into Quality.

Refer the Electromagnetic Table below.

The Electromagnetic Spectrum
Frequency in Hertz	Name	Rough behavior
102	Electrical disturbance	Field
5 X 105-106	Radio Broadcast
108	FM-TV	Waves
1010	Radar
5 X 1014-1015	Light
1018	X-rays
1021	y-rays, nuclear	Particle
1024	y-rays, "artificial"
1027	y-rays, in cosmic rays

Source: R. P. Feynman, Lectures on Physics, chapter 2, p. 7, Table 2-1.

The Innovators' Field Day.

Application of this law to both engineering and mangement can make any innovator or problem solver very happy.

This is because, as innovators or problem solvers we may cleverly use this law to innovate.For example, the microwave oven is based on this principle. Or invention of infra-red ports, mouses and thermal imaging are based on this principle. Similarly, NASA effectively uses cosmic rays to cure and heal astronauts orbitting the space for months. Likewise we can also understand as to how the use of CFL (compact flurorescent lamp) can affect our health. Or for example, we also notice how low frequency electromagetic radiation affects our hearts and anti-friction bearings in machines alike (fields).

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Similarly, when we apply the principle in management systems we can also effectively use the concepts of fields, waves and particles all differeing in energy content, where all changes in management systems are composed of low frequency slow cycles -- fields -- the culture, ethics, vision and strategy of the company and faster cycles of change (medium to high frequencies) which are in the form of waves (general improvement initiatives for a short duration of time) and particles (focussed improvements). It is fair to admit that both low, medium and high frequency cycles co-exist, just as it does in Nature. 

It would not be therefore surprizing to see Design and Systems Thinkers use this prinicple to effectively bring about social changes in fields like health, education and sustainable living. 

And it would also not be difficult to envisage how designers might use this principle to design effective machines and systems (energy, transportations etc) to reduce global energy consumption and global warming.

And architects can also bring about dramatic changes by using the same prinicple of Quanity to Quality to bring about unique relationships between human beings and their dwellings and their energy consumption and their activities and of course their pets.

They are all important for the brave new world that lies before us begging our intelligent thinking and action.

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